Re: [Gnumed-devel] Patient whose name (in the public db) is in a differe

From:

Karsten Hilbert

Subject:

Re: [Gnumed-devel] Patient whose name (in the public db) is in a different alphabet... Greek to me?

Date:

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:15:16 +0200

> > That is a perfectly valid Greek name. Greek keyboards can perfectly
> > well
> > enter those characters. For people not having a Greek keyboard but
> > needing to search for the patient I would recommend googling a greek
> > text and having the patient cut-n-paste the appropriate letters into
> > the search box. GNUmed can (should be able) perfectly fine search
> > for greek names.
>
> You are kidding, right?
Not really. "Recommend" was, however, not the suitable word for the
situation. Personally, I would enter an alias into the nickname field
(or even add a second transliterated name).
In non-time-critical situations I may, however, *have* to resort
to the above technique. There's any number of such possibilities
and some may have to be applied sometimes.
But - non-latin encodings, people, and names are here to stay. We
need to allow them to be themselves. It's a fact of life which I'm
sure you do not doubt.
> e.g. I did use Google translate on the characters that I pasted from
> the name, and I got
> Perantoni, Ms Helen (x)
And hopefully no one spelled that "Perentony, Ms Hellen".
Transliterations are a slippery slope.
> There is a keyboard layout at wikipedia if that would help anyone
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout) whereas handily on the
> Mac some applications including the Mail application give direct
> access to the Mac character palette, of which I attach a screenshot
> with "Greek and Copric" selected:
There's such tools for Windows and Linux as well. I just didn't know
the names off the top of my head.
Karsten
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